


Even Death Can't Part

by navaan



Category: Booster Gold (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Booster Angst, Fade to Black, Fix-It, M/M, Married Sex, Married in Another Universe, Multiverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:09:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25538569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: Something goes wrong and Booster ends up in the wrong universe - or the rightest of them all.
Relationships: Michael Carter/Ted Kord
Comments: 4
Kudos: 60
Collections: Just Married Exchange 2020





	Even Death Can't Part

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theae/gifts).



The stupid chalk board in the middle of the room has all of Rip's scribbles on it. Michelle is standing in front of it, studying the different notes. 

"Mikey," she says. "I get it now. All this time stream stuff."

"I'm not sure _I_ 'm getting it. I don't think anyone can. Jeez, Rip I-think-I'm-the-boss-of you Hunter _doesn't_ half of the time. Not that he’ll ever admit it."

Michael joins her in front of the board to read the chalky note that reads: _Michelle lives_. There’s an untidy arrow pointing from the words to a scribbled: _Batman lost in time??_

That one Michal hasn’t figured out yet and he’s not sure he has figured out all the other random hints of fixed events in the time stream yet. 

Rip’s the one who knows what casualties he’s trying to trigger to keep the timeline intact while Black Beetle and other crazies try to bend time and their universe to their wills.

_Michelle lives._

But there’s the fact: Michelle died.

Michael has the memories to go with that fact. He has the terrible nightmares that will forever remind him of it.

He carries the guilt even now, even though his memories are adapting, adjusting and telling him perhaps it was always this way..

But she's here. Michelle is here. His little sister is standing right here next to him in Rip’s lab at Vanishing Point — the end of time and everything — wearing her white and gold power suit, radiant and alive and ready to join in on his next secret adventure to protect their universe’s timeline. She’s here because Rip Hunter snatched her right from that moment of what Booster _remembers_ was her death. 

And she has no idea. She doesn’t know how many years Michael lived mourning her, blaming himself. All that came after...

There’s so much she doesn’t know about what he’s been through and how he got to where he is — the greatest hero nobody will ever know. 

Well, _Batman_ knew. 

The chalk says he may be Schrödinger's Batman now, so there’s a fifty percent chance someone out there still knows Booster Gold isn’t just an idiot without powers playing at being a hero to make money.

Someone…

Not Ted though.

His eyes hone in on the scribbled name — Ted Kord, circled and crossed out with more lines than necessary. His heart aches just seeing it. He’d had Ted back for a little while… and this was what it came down to.

Above the name is another one. _Barbara Gordon = always Oracle_ the note there reads. That note is circled too. No question marks. No doubt. 

Rip made sure Booster got that message. There’s nothing he can do to change the fate of that Batgirl. 

Michelle seems to pick up what he’s looking at. She frowns. 

Has anyone told her yet what became of Ted? 

She steps forward to inspect the blackboard; until now Booster has just taken its existence in stride but now he has to wonder at an old fashioned thing like it in a place like this. Why chalk instead of computations, protons — a simple holographic screen?

"What makes it different? That's what you're asking yourself," Michelle concludes and nods to herself.

"Yes," he admits and then grins at her weakly. "I'm glad you're here. You have no idea how glad. But it's been a hell of a ride for me, sis."

A hell of a ride. 

In his attempts to save Batgril from her fate, Booster had been punched into a pulp over and over again by the Joker, had nearly died, gone too far — and yet whatever he'd done Barbara Gordon had ended up with a bullet severing her spine. She'd ended up in that wheelchair every single time and for her Batgirl had been history.

Rip had sent him there to teach him that lesson, that they were time masters only in name, for one specific reason: to make sure Booster wouldn’t insist on saving Blue Beetle. 

"Why did he pick her, Michael?" Michelle points at Barbara’s name.

"To teach me a lesson," Booster says and feels he’s not talking to her at all. Maybe he’s talking to Rip who isn’t here or to time itself that is all around him always. "Because people care about her and need her. The Bat..."

It rings false even to his ears.

This isn’t about tall, dark, grumpy and always-on-to-him.

Ted.

This too had been about Ted.

Ted had cared for Barbara Gordon. Booster knows and he knows he tried so hard to change Batgirl's fate for Ted. And not just because it was what Ted would have wanted, what Ted would have done.

It had been part of the bargain Booster made with Rip to go back in time and save _Ted_ — if he managed to change Barbara’s fate.

Spectacular failure had been the result.

He’d gone back for Ted anyway.

What kind of hero were you when you couldn't even save your own sister, your best friend - your dead best friend's cyber crush?

"What happened?" Michelle asks and she steps up to the board, letting her finger glide through the chalk lines of the names Barbara and Ted, smearing the names into each other.

Vertigo nearly turns his stomach and he has to look away. 

_Ted and Barbara._

_Barbara and Ted._

_One broken, one dead._  
.  
Joker’s voice whispers treacherously in his mind. 

"I failed to help her. I stopped Ted's death anyway, not accepting the lesson that some things can’t change for good reasons. Everything unravelled around us, fell apart. Ted lived but we lost the future. All heroes. Max nearly killed us all. Everything I did — it only strengthened the Black Beetle and the chaos he’s creating. There's..."

The story’s much longer and more complicated and he’s not sure how to explain it to the sister that Rip _had_ saved like a consolation prize plucked from the time stream, after Michael had just watched Ted Kord sacrifice himself to keep the timeline in balance.

“Ted was always the real hero. So like him to decide to set things right by letting himself be murdered again.”

His heart breaks a little.

A tiny voice — not Joker’s this time — whispers in the back of his mind: _And you coward never told him how much he means to you._

Michelle smiles at him, finger still making a mess of Rip’s scribbled notes.

It’s so bright it’s painful.

What did it say about Michael Carter that he'd not even tried to serve his sister, but single mindedly had set out to bring back Ted only to lose him again?

Michelle turns around to face him. "What are we going to do now? Rip hasn't checked in. Skeets is down. We have no way but the portal to leave this lab..."

Portal?

The word resonates with him, triggers something in his memory and he can't remember why. 

Skeets mechanical voice pipes up: "You need to wake up, Michael. The time sphere can't take the strain. Another 7.8 second before it will fall apart."

It makes little sense to him, standing here in the middle of Rip's time lab. He slaps at the air, trying to make Skeets swivel away and realizes that the hovering little robot isn't at his shoulder at all. He blinks at empty air.

"I understand, Michael," Michelle says. "Must have been hard losing so much. Losing _him_. He was the only one who got you. The only one who saw you for who you could be. He loved you so much."

Her voice is deeper than before. Something about it is wrong and he stares at her face — it changes in front of his eyes from Michelle, to their mother's tired face, to Barbara’s to her green Oracle avatar. He realizes her finger has left the chalk on the board smudged to form a pattern.

A heart with an arrow stuck in it.

His eyes widen.

"You never said," Michelle's distorted voice goes deeper, sounds like Ted’s as her Oracle face bleeds away into Ted's once more and then melts and evaporates completely, leaving behind an OMAC that grabs for him.

Booster screams at the top of his lungs as metal fingers closer around his throat, choking him.

That's how he slips deeper into darkness — or back to consciousness.

* * *

Booster woke up in a room he’d never seen before.

He hates waking up in unfamiliar places. It happens too often and it’s rarely good. It’s not too long ago that he woke up in the trenches of World War I — ending up saving the life of an altogether too decent ancestor of Maxwell Lord. 

It’s not the trenches this time, not the Mesozoic, not the middle ages. 

He’s resting on his stomach in a decently sized — which to him means _indecently large_ — bed and the pillow is so soft it takes effort to lift his head up enough to get a better look at the room instead of letting his face sink right into it a falling back asleep. 

It’s a bedroom and he has never seen it before.

How had he ended up here?

Had some rich lady picked him up after a photo op?

Had he been drunk?

Things are fragmented and he cannot reach for the memory of the right-before-this-moment. It’s disconcerting and — he doesn’t know what it is. Dangerous? Disconcerting? There’s something about time that’s never a good thing when memories become sketchy and change on you while you’re trying to hold on to the how-it-used-to-be and the how-it-happened-before.

“Skeets?” he asks, sitting up slowly in bed, only then realizing — only then giving it a thought really — that he’s naked under the sheets. He isn’t too worried about that — Booster Gold has nothing to hide or be ashamed of. He’s only human (so’s Batman, thank you very much) but he’s always been in good physical shape.

But where’s his suit?

“Skeets?” he tries again.

Someone laughs. It’s a hearty, happy laugh, warm and coming right from the belly. _That_ ’s so familiar it made goosebumps rise on his skin.

He sits up too fast and his head gets dizzy.

He can’t trust what’s in front of his eyes.

“Ted?” he stammers.

“Finally awake, sleepy head?”

Ted is dead.

Again.

Still.

Whatever.

He’s also right there, sauntering through the doorway into the spacious bedroom, wearing tight fitting jeans and no shirts, no socks… God, his pants aren’t even buttoned up.

Booster has seen him naked, of course. 

And… He looks great, even when his auburn curls are a wet mess as they are at the moment.

“Ted?”

His mouth must be gaping wide.

What’s going on here?

Ted has walked over to the dresser to pick up something and then turns to study him. “Something wrong?” he asks and he’s grinning like the Cheshire Cat with that glint in his eye that says he has a prank lined up that will drive Martian Manhunter up the wall. 

Booster’s in, Ted doesn’t even have to ask. Whatever the prank is — he’ll follow Ted into any trouble as always — and forever if he’s really here.

“Skeets isn’t here,” Ted says. “You sent him out with Michelle, remember?”

No.

He doesn’t.

Because that’s… okay, not impossible, is it?

Ted’s still watching him expectantly. 

Booster needs to say something, but his mouth opens, closes, opens again. Closes. 

He’s a fish out of water in more ways than ever before.

Ted sees right through him and is beside the bed right away.

A hand lands on his shoulder — warm, real, familiar.

He looks up to meet Ted’s expectant, mirthful gaze, still trying to piece the words together… Then Ted leans in — Booster thinks to look him in the eyes, make sure he isn’t concussed, mind controlled… — and takes his open mouth in a searing hot kiss. 

Then Ted leans in again and captures his lips, kisses him.

"Hmph," he yelps into the kiss about three seconds before he gets so dizzy that he has to catch himself against Ted and kisses back. He kisses _back_ and then can’t stop.

Ted isn’t stopping either, his hands on Booster’s face to hold him in place, then Booster’s hands are on Ted’s naked back and before he understands what he’s doing, he’s pulling both of them down. They end up a tangled mess with only thin silk sheets and only half shrugged on jeans between them.

_This isn’t real. It doesn’t matter. It’s not real._

They kiss for an embarrassingly long time, touch.

He feels Ted’s warmth seep into him.

"I know I said it last night but I'm glad you're okay, Michael," Ted whispers. "When you didn't check back in from the time stream I thought something terrible might have happened."

Booster could only stare at Ted's mouth, the only thing that's real to him at the moment.

"I'm..." he starts and words fail him. He ends with; "Sorry."

"Michael, I mean it, I was worried. I’m not just saying it to get another..."

"It's so good to see you," Booster cuts him off, so overwhelmed with happiness that he couldn't even listen. He’s grinning like the idiot he is.

How many times have Blue and Gold grinned at each other like this?

It's familiar.

So is the intimacy even though they’ve never gone this far.

"I'm too young, smart and beautiful to be made a widower so soon," Ted whispers and kisses a line down his throat.

“What?”

“You know,” Ted whispers and the familiar laugh is in his voice, “I didn’t get myself a trophy husband to just lose him to his time travel heroics that nobody is supposed to know about.”

“Trophy husband?” he repeats. The meaning doesn’t sink in. 

“Mr. Michael Kord, what’s wrong with you this morning? Should I cancel my meeting? Are you sure you’re…”

There’s a ring on Ted’s finger and it’s the best dream until he realizes there’s no ring on his own finger.

“Is this the prank?”

“Prank?” Ted scrunches up his nose. “That I can stay in for my husband who is a little rattled after a near death experience? Earth to Booster Gold, is Batman made of Kryptonite?”

“What?”

“I don’t know it’s a strange 25th century thing _you_ keep saying.”

His eyes finally find the ring that is sitting on the nightstand

“Oh,” he says and reaches for it. 

In his rush to grab it and test it on his finger, he feels like a reverse Cinderella. The ring fits perfectly. 

“Oh,” he repeats and Ted stares, then the laughter is back and Ted tackles him into the sheets. 

“I get it,” he says, “You’re trying to get me to stay? Fine. The Bug needs repairs but the Bug III is operational. I can stay.”

Stay apparently means more kissing.

Not that Booster is complaining.

Not at all.

It’s too good.

More so when it turns out it involved more than kissing, when hands find his cock and _know_ how to touch him and when he reaches out for Ted to press him down into the sheets to return the favor, with hands and lips and laughter…

* * *

Ted gets out of bed to get them food and Booster uses the time to get out of bed and walk to the windows and take a look at this strange new world outside this bedroom in the unreal.

Beyond the surrounding rooftops, he sees a digital billboard and his breath gets stuck in his throat. It's Booster Gold smiling his million dollar smile at the camera, holding up a fancy-for-2022 phone. 

"What the hell?" he nearly shouts but bites his lip to stop himself before Ted can hear him and rush back to his side. Booster’s supposed to be the greatest hero nobody ever hears of — the idiot who is in it for the fame and money, yes, but a sad failure to everyone but the few who’ll know he’s guarding the time stream. The times of advertisements and influencer deals were past him, he’s only playing the goofy idiot for all who weren't supposed to know. 

"Skeets? Did we change something? What did we do? How do we undo it?" he asks the air hoping for an answer. 

Nothing.

He goes to look for his suit, find it in the next room.

“Skeets?” he asks into the long range communicator. “Where are you?”

“I am with Michelle, Michael. We’re accompanying Rip Hunter to Renaissance Italy.”

“Don’t let her pose for the Mona Lisa,” he advises automatically, remembering a recent misadventure. “Can you tell me where I am?”

The robotic voice hesitates. “We left you at Kord Industries. This signal indicates you haven’t left Kord Industries.”

“Let me rephrase: Where and when am I?”

"Metropolis, 2022.” 

“2022. Did we change something? What did we do?”

“We did not change the timeline, Michael." Skeets answers. 

“You better not have,” Rip’s voice grumbled in the background.

"Great! Just great. Thank you!" he nearly shouted and cut the connection.

He walked back, suit slung over one arm, took another look out at Metropolis, the billboard, then back at the bed. 

He knew reality was different. 

The _universe_.

Something had happened but the fragments of knowledge were already slipping away from him.. 

He vaguely remembers his dream, his moment with _his_ Michelle in the time lab — the heart she’d drawn on the board. 

The portal in the lab.

Booster vaguely remembers it malfunctioning. 

Vague.

It’s all vague.

“Hey,” Ted says. Solid. Real. Half clad in the blue beetle uniform and sporting a new bruise on his cheek.

“We’re not in the Justice League?” he asks, because it’s the first thing on his mind. 

Ted laughs. “That’s what you ask me, when I get home without the promised food and some extra bruises — to my naked husband, who is holding his uniform? You’re heading out?”

“No,” he shoots back, looking at the power suit and briefly down at himself.

They’d had sex right here not too long ago, so he did not see any reason to be shy now.

“We’re in the Justice League?”

“No,” Ted says with a frown. “Why would we be?”

“Maxwell Lord?”

“Who is Maxwell Lord?” Ted asks back.

Booster feels a tension lifting. He nearly pounces, initiating the kissing this time.

He has no idea how he has managed to step so far sideways through time that he ended up in the wrong universe — and he has even less of an idea where the Michael Carter of this earth has ended up or when he’s going to be back or if they have merged or... But Ted’s here.

Booster hugs him close, buries his face in his shoulder and just holds on for dear life.

"Hey," Ted whispers and pats Booster's head.

"Hey," he breathes back. 

"Are you sure you’re okay? No concussions from your last mission?"

"N... No."

"Something else wrong?"

He wants to laugh, cry, shout. Tears were pricking his eyes already, remembering how much he has longed to have Ted back in his life — to be more than friends.

"We're married," he whispers. 

Ted quirks an eyebrow and then pulls away to get a better look at him. "We are," he agreed and then grinned. "Has the time line changed? Are you checking?”

“Yeah, kind of?”

“Alright. Okay. Still getting used to that. And I haven't seen my time stream police husband in far too long."

"I'm sorry," Booster says immediately, feeling like a thief. And he isn't that kind of person anymore, isn't he? He has to tell Ted. "I'm so sorry, I'm not..."

Ted kisses him.

When they come up for air, memory is shifting.

Fragmented.

Booster can’t remember that immediately-before, just knows something is moving around, adjusting. But he’s sure he can't live without _this_. And he can very much get used to this life.

Ted.

Marriage. 

Love.

He has always seen himself as damaged goods. Too broken to find the right person and build a life with them.

But perhaps he could make it work.

Ted grins at him, pulls him towards the bed.

Yes, with Ted he can do anything.

He’ll make it work.


End file.
